


Fog on the Clyde: Part One

by AJHall



Series: Fog on the Clyde [1]
Category: Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Genre: Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 20:39:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 21,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2402156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fog on the Clyde is set about six months after the conclusion of the events of the film.  Matters left unresolved cast lingering shadows, the Legion tries to rebuild in the wake of Totenkopf's destruction, Dex struggles with feelings he dare not express, Joe makes himself elusive and, on both sides of the Atlantic, faceless men in green-silk drawing rooms plan a coup which will give them world domination.</p><p>An old-fashioned shocker, presented in four instalments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. McPherson receives a plea for help

McPherson read the telegram again. Although - thank the Dear - he had been in easy circumstances these last decade or more, and the Company had come through the lean years better than many, his harsh Aberdonian ancestry made him purse his lips at the sheer extravagance of it all. From New York - the whole way across the Atlantic - and getting on for fifty words or more, at an amount in shillings per word he didn't care to think about. "OLDEST FRIEND" - as if she needed to spend her money buttering him up -

He had been her devoted slave since she was six years old, after all.

His thin lips relaxed in a reflexive smile as he went back, in fancy, to the day long ago when he'd looked up from his slope and laid down his fine-pointed pencil at the irruption into the drawing office of a little imp; carefully rag-rolled ringlets of black hair turning under the influence of gravity and Original Sin into a forest of tangles around her head; the lace-edges of her long pantaloons showing under her fussy white pinafore dress with the pink trim above her many-buttoned little black patent-leather ankle boots - idiotic, when one thought about it, what fashion then dictated as suitable clothing for little girls.

She'd pointed a stubby little finger at his slope and demanded, in a high imperious voice, that he tell her now what he was drawing.

"Please," she added as an obvious afterthought, and a concession to good manners. He'd sighed, and turned to face her: he knew who she had to be, and the Gaffer's granddaughter carried her own consequence with her, even if she was less than four feet in height, and wearing lace trimmed pantaloons, to boot.

"It's a battleship," he'd said. "The Company has been asked to build it by the King."

Or at least, by his Majesty's Lords of the Admiralty, which came close enough, and higher, indeed, in McPherson's humble estimation.

The dust motes had hung in the golden light that streamed through the window. And a clean, tiny and definitely bitten forefinger had tapped down on his slope.

"Good," the small piping voice had said in the tone of absolute confidence. "You shall draw it, Mr Mc -" there was a pause, there, as she spelled out his name from the small plaque on the front of his desk. "You shall draw it, Mr McPherson, and Grandpapa shall build it, and I shall command it."

"You most definitely shall not, Miss Francesca," a thundering voice of doom from the doorway. He had looked up to see the starched righteousness of an English nanny bearing down upon him - and God forgive him, but that aggressively presented bosom had been present in his mind when he'd drawn the designs for the icebreaker ship that that Polar explorer - what was his name? - had commissioned from the Yard the year after, and heaven knew it had done the job, breasting the Arctic ice floes with indissoluble firmness of purpose.

He'd paused then, expecting that the little one would cry or throw a tantrum - she seemed paused on the edge of either - but at that moment a light, amused voice had cut in.

"No, indeed you shan't, Franky."

A bare-headed young man strode across the drawing office, sweeping up his daughter and balancing her on his hip in a tight embrace.

"Franky, that battleship's going to be your old father's." He'd swung her round, so that the shaft of sunlight which cut into the drawing office caught them both, embodying them for the one perfect instant in untarnishable gold. "Ask Mr McPherson nicely, and in 20 years time maybe he'll draw you a ship for you to command. In the meantime, you need to learn how to obey. Thank you for putting up with my little monster, McPherson. I'm sorry if she's troubled you."

He had expected never to see her again. As though the iron will of her Grandfather, the shipmaster, would have been lost to the generations who came after him. As though she wouldn't have wandered where she wanted.

His attention fell again on the telegram. 

HELP FRIEND IN TROUBLE STOP GOOD MAN WRONGLY MALIGNED STOP HIDE EVEN FROM ME STOP NO NAMES NO PACK DRILL STOP CAN TRUST ONLY YOU STOP MORRIGAN

Morrigan. The Celtic Goddess, Lady of Battles.

And Franky, to his certain knowledge, had never lost one of them yet. The first being convincing everyone up to and including the First Lord that Osborne Naval Academy was at least as proper a school for a young lady as Roedean. And one much more to her satisfaction. And that of the rest of the British Empire.

He looked up from the telegram on his blotter and out through the window. It was early afternoon, but the yellowing tendrils of a peasouper were spreading upwards from the river. The naphtha lamps were spilling pools of light into the gloom. The thundering rumble of hammers and riveters - so life-affirming after those dead years of the Depression, when barely a tool had moved on Clydeside from Gourock to the Erskine Bridge - came dimly in, muffled by the fog. He hoped, briefly, Franky's protegé would have a safe journey of it. Where, though, to bestow him?

His memory had been stimulated, it seemed. Another picture floated in - walking back from the Dominie's in a long-ago springtime, arguing with his fellow student and dearest friend.

"Surely," he'd said, "you have to take what's in you and make the best of it?"

Andrew had looked at him with a great light wakening in his face.

"Aye. But what's best for you is no what's best for me. Man, that's what you have to understand. For you, it's going to Glasgow, and drawing plans, and maybe being the big engineer for the big man in time. But that's not for me. I have to go where I'm called."

He'd patted his pocket then, and smiled. "Davey, I wish you the best of luck. But for me, I'm going where Robert Owen and John Calvin choose take me. You're a good man, Davey. I doubt we'll meet again one of these days. But I can't be driven, Davey. I'll only be led, and I'll only be led if I see the light shining in front of my eyes."

McPherson looked down at his blotter and tapped the brass bell. The scrawny, thin-faced boy who came at the summons woke memories of how he, too, might have looked thirty years ago. His voice was gruff as he scribbled a few words on a sheet of paper, folded it into an envelope, and told the boy to take it as soon as possible to the scribbled address, and not get lost, or waste time, either.

The boy nodded and was gone. 

The fog grew thicker, pressing in upon the windows. McPherson, who was a man of sober and industrious habits, found himself staring out into it for a long time, trying to trace long-dead faces in the murk.


	2. The worst day of Dex's life

What would turn out to be the worst day of Dex Dearborn's life had begun over 3000 miles away, and twenty hours earlier.

To be fair, nothing about the day as it dawned foreshadowed that by the time the sun set his world would have been shattered comprehensively about his ears. Never to be repaired.

A message had come in overnight, from some airbase somewhere near Tashkent. Joe would likely not be back to base for at least two or three days. As always, his absence took the light from the Legion. Without him they moved sluggishly; chores were poorly performed or neglected altogether. Someone had to take up the slack. And that someone was inevitably resented. And sometimes Dex wondered if his erratic voyages round the world over the last few months really meant - as Joe always asserted - that he needed to restore Totenkopf's devastation on a case-by-case basis, or if he was running away from something. 

Running away was not something Dex would ever before have associated with Joe. Nor, to be fair, with himself either. Except - since last Thursday.

He looked down at the mug of coffee cooling on his work-bench, his face flushing. Remembering Thursday left him feeling soiled, filthy. He gulped, as the bile rose in his gut and he swallowed. He only wished he could be sure that, given the chance again by some time-travelling device (his mind had played with the possibility of turning that comic-book notion into reality, and what a coup that would be!) he would, second time around, have turned down the choice which a mixture of an evening's bath-tub hooch and an adult life-time's sense of isolation had made so inevitable - and so completely avoidable.

He felt so changed inside himself - and not for the better - since Thursday, that he almost caught himself dreading being in the same room as Joe again, and relieved at the brief reprieve signalled by the overnight message. For when they met again, surely Joe - with all his experience of the world - would notice - something - different about him, and it was hardly as if he could explain - 

Work, however, was something he could always use to shut out the world. Even during those dark days when Joe's plane had gone down, somewhere over China, he had been able to work. He had flung forth every tendril of his genius to make the Legion safer, to guard it against Joe's return. The return he refused to believe would never happen. The return he made them all believe in, too.

And the miracle, at last, had happened. 

Joe had returned, and a respectable percentage of the Legion was still standing - whole - on the tarmac of the base to greet him as he landed.

Everyone had crowded to congratulate Joe. No-one had congratulated Dex. He hadn't expected it; he'd had his reward already, in a sidelong smile, a relieved arm-clasp, the feel of sun-warmed sheepskin under his hand.

The sense of duty done.

He had done what was needed by the Legion. And however the world had changed since then, he needed to go on doing it.

His coffee downed, and the basic paperwork of the base handled, the main contract was, as it must be, his principal concern. He worked on the blue-prints for an hour or more. There was a modification to inspect; the workshops had turned out a new prototype for that crucial central assemblage overnight. He turned, to compare the finished product to the drawing he held in his hand.

Something was wrong.

To the uninitiated, perhaps the solid hunk of machinery standing four-square before him was that depicted in the blue-print. The changes between it and the diagram in his hand could be measured in thousandths of an inch. An eye should not accurately attempt to judge them. 

Nevertheless Dex never doubted for an instant that the latest prototype had been produced - Sandy had signed off on it, and the Angel Gabriel would be caught faking a timesheet sooner than Sandy - and that it was not, whatever the paperwork said, the latest prototype that was standing before him.

Something was horribly wrong.

A frantic hour or so tearing through papers and round the base turned up - for the life of him Dex would have said in a place on his desk he had searched rigorously fifteen minutes earlier - a piece of paper slid between two others with a message cut and pasted awkwardly from the pages of the local newspaper.

_If you try looking for it, you might be surprised by what's going to be found with it. You thought no-one was watching, last Thursday? Ooh, Mr Dearborn. Did they never tell you? "Thou God seest me"? We are the tongues of righteousness, and the scourge of the evildoer. And now everyone we choose can look through God's eyes. So: how do you fancy spending the next three years in jail? But then again, perhaps you'd enjoy that . Especially when it came to the showers. But if you'd prefer not - the answer is in your hands. Give us your co-operation and maybe you get your machine back - and even your reputation. But otherwise -_

He only made it to the cubicle in the men's room an instant before he threw up. He curled against the partition for a good three-quarters of an hour before he stopped shaking enough to go back to his office. Once there, he sat with his head in his hands, his elbows propped on his desk for a long time. When he came to himself he stretched - his hand cold and corpse-like - for the cool Bakelite of the telephone handset. He dialled a number, and, as if from half a world away, he heard the confused jumble as he was put through to a defensive switchboard operator.

"Yes," he breathed into the receiver. "Yes, I do need to speak to her. In person. As soon as possible."

Joe was half a world away, and in any event there was no power on earth that would hold up Dex if he had to stand before him and confess that, after all, he had betrayed the Legion unto its enemies through his own weakness. 

To prevent that humiliation he was prepared to confront the Devil in person. Or at least, Madam his Hellishness's personal representative on earth.

"Yes," he said with unaccustomed tetchiness to the operator. "I said a personal call, and I mean it."


	3. Franky throws out a life-line

The restaurant lights pooled out onto the rainwashed parking lot. Inside, it was warm, welcoming; a home-like mix of Tiffany glass-shaded lamps, and comfortably worn red-leather booths. Dex, once he had steeled himself to this meeting, found himself being unreasonably glad that he was not going to have to wait around. Franky, despite her longer journey from the city, had managed to precede him to the rendezvous.

She looked - like she always did in civvies. As though she'd marched up to her dressmaker and ordered him at gunpoint to find the hidden military styling buried within whatever the extravagances of the current fashion might be, and for God's sake bring it out, smartish, or she'd know the reason why. Her silk-stockinged ankles were crossed as she lounged back in the restaurant booth; at his approach, the waiter bobbing nervously in front of him, she uncrossed them so as to get to her feet and extend a hand to shake, man-like, earning herself a withering glance of disapprobation from the All-American family two tables over and one to the left, self-evidently celebrating a birthday for either the little girl in frilled organza or the little boy in a white Eton collar.

Dex felt a very slight easing of the knot in his guts. 

The waiter hovered; took drinks orders; vanished.

"Well?" Franky barked. "This had better be important, Dex. I don't get allowed so much leave on top of the King-Emperor's princely salary that I can afford to waste it."

His hand was shaking, but he pushed the torn scrap of paper across the red and white gingham towards her. In one quick glance she took it in, and then as Dex had been expecting, her brows drew down.

" _If you try looking for it, you might be surprised by what's going to be found with it_ " she quoted. "Well Dex? What? What might be found with it? And what the blazes is _it_ when it's at home?"

He bit frantically down on his gum. It was only the knowledge that if he funked telling Franky about everything, the only other place to go was to Joe - and he certainly couldn't even imagine that one - that let him summon up enough saliva in his mouth to give him the ability to start stumbling out his explanation.

"What might be found - well, I t- think that's going to be photographs."

"Photographs?"

His stomach lurched again as another connection was made. That faint sound in the cheap hotel room, in among that frantic melée of sweat and guilt and fumbling; pretending that what he'd got that night was anything other than - what he'd got - pretending (God forgive him) that the thickset body on top of him wasn't that of a random stranger, that the fleshy torso bore shrapnel scars, not the indented cicatrices of the waistband of an off-the-peg suit, worn too tight for vanity's sake, that the eyes gazing up at him weren't a flat brown, glazed with the effects of indifferent liquor and bloodshot about the whites -

_I still should have realised that was a camera shutter opening. I've heard them often enough, after all. Round Joe - round Joe and Polly - Cap lives his life accompanied by an orchestra of cameras snapping. Even through that kind of background clutter, I ought to have picked up that signal, at least -_

He nodded.

"O- of me. With someone."

Franky's remaining eye smouldered, her mouth looked as though she was chewing down on something she didn't find all that palatable.

"Well, for your sake, I'd certainly hope it was with someone, Dex. I mean, however much of a mechanical genius you are, I'd hate to think that there was blackmailing potential in a photograph of you with no-one. So? Whom?"

He gaped. Her brows snapped down impatiently.

"Spit it out, Dex, for God's sake. If you're holding back on the details in order to spare my maidenly modesty, I can assure you that the Senior Service demands you hand it in when you join, for the duration. No doubt they'll let me reclaim it when I finally turn in my papers, if I pass over the right chitty. But in the meantime; I've been in charge of a vessel with a human complement of the best part of a thousand for nearly three years, and if there's a variety of human idiocy that exists, I'd be surprised if it hadn't been brought to my official attention by now. Including that variant from Gib, which involved the Pongos' regimental goat, a rugby ball, two of the most notorious tarts on the Rock and the best Chief Petty Officer I ever sailed with. So. What photographs and with whom?"

Dex shrugged helplessly. 

"I - didn't know his name - his real name. I didn't know -"

Franky's half-ruined, wholly beautiful face came alight for a second, giving Dex a momentary glimpse of a blazing emotion - relief? regret? - before the shutters came down again, and she was all brass buttons and navy blue serge again. Her voice was clipped, parade-ground, official.

"So. You and someone you didn't know. Some - him."

He nodded, ducking his head beneath her gaze, and chewing nervously on his gum. She sighed, noisily. In the pointed silence which prevailed for the next few minutes the waiter reappeared, took their order - more for form's sake, so far as Dex was concerned, he didn't think he'd ever be able to swallow again - and vanished.

"Well?"

Franky looked like she wanted to rake her fingers through her hair - they were straying that direction - but as ever it was tightly braided back, under official discipline even if the rest of her was off-duty for the evening.

"Suppose, Dex, you tell me what's been taken? And from where?"

In a low voice he explained about the prototypes. When he had done she let out a low whistle.

"So. It seems you have a traitor on the base. And if that weren't hard enough for you to handle, it would seem it's Uncle Sam's secrets he's been helping himself to, to boot. What's that about, Dex? I always thought you guys prided yourselves on being strictly independent? At least, that's what you've always told me when I fancied putting you under an exclusive retainer on the King-Emperor's account."

Relieved beyond measure to have something impersonal to discuss, Dex outlined quickly the full extent of the economic harm that Totenkopf's mechanical monsters had inflicted on the Legion. How desperate their financial straits had been. So, conscious all the time of the dangers of becoming Government contractors, there had really been no option but to take the seductively profitable development opportunities offered. On a strictly one-off and short-term basis, of course. And now -

She exhaled again. 

"Another complication I could have done without. Look, Dex; it's no official secret that Ours and Yours are the closest of possible allies. The most intimate - "

Dex was unsure whether that look down her nose as she exhaled the adjective was directed at him or not.

"The most intimate of special relationships. Quite. Divided by mutual suspicion, cultural incompatibility - you think it's easy explaining Prohibition to an Able-Seaman who's landed in New York for the first time in his life after 28 days at sea? - backbiting, two incompatible but equally pronounced superiority complexes and a prolonged squabble about who really won the last war which won't be resolved until the next war thankfully puts it out of everyone's consciousness...."

Franky sighed, and stared into her glass of Coke as though she'd really rather it had had a large dollop of Jamaica rum in it. 

"So?" Dex said, when the silence threatened to become even more pronounced, and even the Norman Rockwell portrait of family unity across the aisle was showing signs of boredom. 

"It means, Dex, that even from a semi-demi-hemi-official position I can't do a thing for you. On pain of - at the very least - a diplomatic incident. Being drummed out of the Service. Collapse of relations between London and Washington. That sort of thing."

His stomach turned over, and the restaurant whirled around him. For one brief instant he wondered if it was possible to die of pure shame. Before he had to turn back to the base and wait for Joe to land so he could confess everything to him. Who was now, of course, his only option. When he could listen again, however, Franky's calm, British tones were still proceeding above the level of his head.

"Brace up, Dex. You Yanks are all the same. You always make the mistake of stopping lying at the precise moment when keeping right on going with the misinformation is what's needed to get the job done. As a Malaysian stoker of mine once said: God wouldn't have given us an Empire on which the sun never set if he thought he could trust an Englishman in the dark."

He looked up. She reached out for his hand, and patted it as it rested on the fine linen of the tablecloth.

"I'll sort it, Dex. After all; suppose they find out. What can they do: ground me? I'll still have had three years flying time I'd not have had if some genius hadn't proved to the Powers That Be that there _are_ mechanical ways of compensating for loss of stereoscopic vision. No matter what Official Regulations might say about one-eyed pilots, impossibility of authorising, rules for the prevention of."

Her voice changed. "Be on the dockside. Steamer Piers, Bay 21, 02:00 hours. Bring your kitbag and all the liquid untraceable assets you can get together in the time. You're shipping out, until someone gets to the bottom of all this. And that someone can't be you. In the circumstances. You're the hole that the bad guys think they've got into the Legion. As from now, I'm getting you out of that situation."

He was dizzy with gratitude, but there was still a small, masochistic part of his brain that impelled him to say, "But the - other thing? What about that?"

Her glance was, for the moment, frosty. He knew, now, how she might have earned that other, opprobrious nickname that he'd seen Joe punch a man half-way across the hangar for using in his hearing. Nevertheless, he was not without courage. It was for lack of the right skills that he had never flown with the Legion, not the lack of the right spirit. He pressed on.

"Well? Now you know I'm a pervert? A law-breaker?"

Her infinitely aristocratic lip curled. " We-ll, if this was one of those times when I have to consider such matters under King's Regulations then I grant things might be a lee-tle awkward. Fortunately, our little local difficulty back in 1776 makes King's Regulations sublimely irrelevant to you."

That dispassionate, one-eyed glance swept over him again.

"And even their Lords of the Admiralty's disapproval tends to be based on their belief that that sort of thing is likely to prejudice the good order and discipline of the vessel or the safety of the ship, rather than anything else."

Her eye rested on him for the moment. Her lips relaxed from their expression of frozen chill. "Dex, I never thought for one instant you would ever do anything to prejudice the safety of any ship Joe was sailing on at the relevant time. After all, you're here now." Her long forefinger tapped down on the incriminating message on the tablecloth. "Contrary, it seems, to the expectations of our anonymous friend here."

Her smile became unambiguously warm for the first time that evening. "Go on, Dex. Whatever I might think about anything else, I can't care for a law that turns honest men into traitors for sheer fear. Come on. We'd best be going. You to pack, and I - I've got some telegrams to send."

Franky raised an arm in an imperious gesture, summoning the waiter. When the check arrived on its little silver tray she captured it despite Dex's protests, and dropped two bills down, waving off the waiter's mutters about change in a way that suggested either she was used to tipping with wild generosity or that she hadn't quite managed to adjust to the dollar/sterling exchange rate.

"After all," she said with a subtle, serpentine smile as he handed her into her car before finding his own in the restaurant parking lot, and catching (as he had) the parting, anxious glance of the family from the adjoining table as they bundled into a Black Ford coupe, "it would never do if we weren't going to live down to their expectations, the both of us, would it?"


	4. Joe flies back from Tashkent and into a storm

There was a ridiculous amount of activity on the ground at the base; it looked like a kicked ant-heap. And what were those two large white pantechnicons with the red crosses painted on their sides doing parked over on the left side of the field? And why wasn't Dex on the RT to welcome him when he'd identified himself as he began his approach?

What, in short, was going on?

Joe landed, and taxied over to the hangar. A couple of the boys came running over to greet him as soon as he swung out of the cockpit, but before they could do anything other than exchange the most perfunctory of greetings a chilly, blonde person in a severe British naval uniform which denoted her status as Sick Bay Attendant (Senior Grade) but which did nothing for her more-than-presentable figure appeared from out of the hangar's gloom. She looked down at her clipboard, and checked something off on it in royal-blue ink with a rather excessive flourish of the fountain-pen she pulled from her breast-pocket.

"Good," she said without preamble. "About time. We've been waiting for you to land. You're lucky. Surgeon-Commander Davies can see you immediately."

He gaped, and she looked impatiently across at him. "Well," she said, "don't keep him waiting. He's got another twenty-four scheduled for this afternoon. If you weren't in the Priority A group - direct and prolonged contact - you'd be waiting until tomorrow. And it's a good job you weren't held up any longer - wherever it is you've been. After all, we don't want to extend the quarantine on the base any longer than necessary, now, do we?"

With an effort, he clamped his jaw shut. He felt that otherwise he'd be resembling the local village idiot any moment now. Among the group who were helping to wheel his plane away to its place in the hangar he spotted Sandy's grizzled, reassuringly sensible head.

"Sandy? Would you kindly tell me what the hell appears to be happening?"

There was a snort from beside him; it appeared their visitor disapproved of swearing, at least in mixed company. Sandy shrugged.

"No idea. They came in day before yesterday. Seems there's some sort of high-level naval flap among the British about whether people who came into contact with Totenkopf's menagerie have started spreading some new sort of bird flu, or something." He frowned. "Kalinov seems to think it's all a big panic about nothing - but Dex left orders saying they were to be left to get on with it, and we were to clear space for their mobile clinic, and fall in to be examined. So we did. Not that there's much to it. They did me yesterday. Just banging a hammer on your knee and taking some blood and asking you all sorts of idiotic questions about where you've been and who you've seen - "trying to trace possible disease vectors," they called it." 

The visitor was tapping her pen on her clipboard with ever increasing impatience, and Joe decided that the only thing for it was to find this Davies person and find what on earth this was all about. He set off towards the pantechnicons with a long-legged stride which left the visitor scampering to keep up, and visibly clinging onto her dignity as she babbled some idiocies about zoonoses (and heavens knew those beasts had been quite smelly enough at close quarters, so that at least made sense) . 

He was not, to be fair, minded to pay her much attention. But the sooner he got to the bottom of this nonsense the better, and it was clear that only the top man would be likely to tell him anything useful. It seemed idiotic to him - surely any illness would have shown up months ago, if there'd been any to be had - but then Franky's lot were hardly renowned for throwing large public panics about nothing, and if Dex had given orders that it was to be taken seriously -

And then the oddity of Sandy's phrasing struck him. Not "given" orders. "Left" orders. The radio silence on his approach assumed a new and sinister significance. His stomach muscles clenching with apprehension, he strode into the mobile clinic.

Some time later, Joe found himself equally agitated, but much better informed.

Franky's pet saw-bones had turned out to be a slight, dark-haired, sallow-featured man, whose chilly manner and hooded eyes gave him a repellently reptilian air. He was also, Joe gathered, a very long way indeed from being just her medical officer. In a brisk, impersonal tone he outlined the events of the last few days. Joe's mood sank through horrified disbelief to horrified acceptance to - just plain horror.

A traitor on the base - the prototype stolen - Franky putting her neck and career on the line for the lot of them - and Dex, Dex -

Joe began fiddling with a pencil that someone had left on the desk between him and Davies, and was surprised, a second later, to hear a sharp sound and feel the sting of splinters flying into skin as it snapped under the pressure of his fingers. Davies - blast him - looked at him in an interested way, as though, Joe thought fiercely, he was mentally ticking a box in some diagnostic checklist or other, and contemplating recommendations for appropriate therapy.

"Yes," Davies said, "it was rather difficult to persuade the Captain to tell me that particular detail. But it was blindingly obvious there had to be more to the story than she was prepared - at first - to share with me. And I pointed out to her that as a doctor there are few things more frustrating - or, indeed, unhelpful - than a patient concealing important details because of a misplaced concern for the reaction of the physician. And that I'd found the principle transferred admirably into other areas of expertise. A view she was - eventually - prepared to accept."

He looked thoughtfully across the desk at Joe. "Very curious, the phenomenon of inversion. What causes it, I wonder; the little fault-lines that form under the surface of an apparently normal exterior and then, when conditions favour it, simply - shatter."

He raised his hand above the desk, opening his clenched fist and spreading his fingers wide in a dismissive gesture which, Joe presumed, was intended to mimic a flawed personality finally coming to grief under ideal laboratory conditions.

His voice a touch rougher than, perhaps, he had intended it to come out, Joe said, "I'll remind you, you're talking about my closest friend. The cleverest man I know. As well as one of the bravest. One who's saved my life more times than I can count. I can tell you now; whatever's happened, Dex wouldn't just - shatter."

Davies put his head on one side, eying Joe with a speculative air that was only just the right side of offensive. Momentarily Joe wondered how unforgiving Franky would be if he gave in to his sudden impulse to force Davies' head through the nearest solid wood panelling.

Before, however, he could say or do anything Davies added, "Of course, it's something we all, still, know very little about, even with the benefits of all the insights into the Mind which weren't available to our predecessors. And, strictly between ourselves, I remain unconvinced that even a giant like Freud didn't approach the subject with an uncharacteristic lack of sophistication."

"Why don't you write your own paper, then?" Joe snapped. "As a Surgeon-Commander in His Majesty's Navy, I'd say from personal observation and popular repute you'd hardly lack for research material."

Unexpectedly, a smile broke through Davies' wintry expression, rendering him almost human. "And I can name at least one former Lord of the Admiralty who was entirely of your opinion. Yes. Quite. Given our officers go virtually from the nursery to their all-male prep-schools, then on at thirteen to Osborne and Dartmouth - which remain, despite the strenuous efforts of the likes of the Old Lady, nearly as sequestered from the influence of the fairer sex - and that our Other Ranks are, to put it bluntly, the opportunistic sweepings of all the dockyard slums from Portland to Peterhead, drifting endlessly around together in what is, at best, a floating prison, swinging between extremes of intense boredom and momentary spasms of heart-quickening terror - well, I agree. I'd not say my thesis would be likely to be gravelled for lack of matter. Still. _Revenons à nos moutons_. I believe, you know, that our enemies will, at this particular moment rather be ruing their choice of blackmail topics. To say nothing of their choice of victims. Yes. A very short-sighted move on their part."

Joe's heart leapt. Suddenly he started to appreciate the little man's finer qualities. After all, he'd never known Franky pick a duffer yet - he'd eventually learnt by expensive personal experience not to bet against her, no matter how favourable the odds.

"Why not?"

"Work it out for yourself. Once - Dex - resisted the blackmail - and I'll grant you his courage, that can't have been easy - releasing the photographs would be the best way they could find to ensure not only that Uncle Sam would pull the current contract but that you'd never get a sniff of the next one 'til after Satan found himself ice-skating to work."

Joe's insides gave a lurch. "That bad?"

Davies shrugged. "Your research director? The acting commander of the base? That sort of allegation? I can tell you, from what I know of how the Powers think, I reckon you could be the most forward-thinking genius the world has yet known, and have single-handed saved the world from an enemy worse than any of us dreamt of having to face in the last little problem we knew as a World War, and Ours and Yours would still pull your security clearance forever if they got a whiff of something like this."

Joe nodded, his lips tightly compressed. 

Davies' expression changed; he looked positively cheerful. "So, then we know that they can't use the photographs without landing themselves with a whole new contractor goodness-knows-where to infiltrate - bless him for taking himself off the board rather than let himself be played, after all. You're right; he must have quite a brain on him. So now we know, don't we, where they'll be coming next."

Joe tried to look less non-plussed than he felt. But:

"Where?" he hazarded.

Davies had an unmistakably Cheshire Cat smile."Why; to you. Of course. What else did you expect?"

As Joe was still absorbing that particular blow to the solar plexus, Davies bent confidingly across the desk.

 

"I do have one or two suggestions for when they do. If you're not offended if I share them?"

Joe nodded, wordlessly. Their heads bent together. After half an hour or so Joe left the pantechnicon. His head was still in a whirl, and there was information he'd had today that he thought it might take a lifetime to get to grips with, but there was one thing he was certain sure of.

It wasn't just personal vanity that told him that Franky had an unerring gift for choosing the right man for the job. 

Whatever it might be.


	5. Meanwhile, back in Scotland...

Despite his egalitarian principles, McAllister knew when, as the owner of a small custom-engineering workshop, it was best to withdraw himself discreetly from the shop-floor to the quiet seclusion of his office upstairs, and leave the men to sort out their differences for themselves. The new foreman - Mikey, he called himself, though privately McAllister doubted it was his real name - would just have to cope. These were hard men, and it took a harder one to master them. But it was bad luck for the American to have run into Geordie McGeown, liquored up and, as ever with Geordie, nursing some obscure grudge compounded of four parts muddle-headed street-corner demagoguery, three parts whisky, two parts the effects of an elementary school education which had been long on instilling the duty to hate Papists, and short on teaching logical thought, and one part who-knew-what.

Policy notwithstanding, McAllister left the office door open a prudent sliver. Quiet-spoken Mikey was one of the shortest men on the shop-floor, looking five years younger than his asserted age, whose favourite expletive "Gosh darn it" contrasted almost comically with the salty, curse-laced argot of the Glasgow foundries which was the native tongue of the men around him. If this went the way McAllister feared, he might have to intervene in person. If it came to that, of course, Mikey would be finished as a foreman, and would be the laughing stock of Clydeside to boot; the foreman who needed the factory owner to wipe his bottom for him. Nevertheless, McAllister was a humane man, and wouldn't stand by and see black bloody murder done on his premises.

In any event, Mikey had been placed under his protection by someone whose claims could not be denied.

He'd been surprised to get Davey's message after so many years; more surprised to find his old friend proposing a clandestine meeting. 

They'd met in one of the quieter galleries at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in front of an exuberant mid-Victorian picture of the launch of The Great Eastern which Davey privately considered both an affront to local pride and something the artist might have brought off better had he served a proper ship-building apprenticeship, or at least been told a few home truths about displacement of large vessels in water.

They'd greeted each other with the restrained surprise of two old acquaintances meeting by chance in a public place after a separation encompassing more than mere years and the difference between the poorer and the wealthier quarters of the city, and after the best part of an hour's chat it had seemed natural for them to repair to a quiet tea-shop to continue their recollections of long-dead people, and places since changed beyond all recollection.

Which was when Davey had sprung it on him.

"Ye'll maybe have a space for another skilled man, Andrew?" he'd enquired, between one reminiscence and another.

McAllister had blinked. Year on year throughout the Depression he'd juggled one thing and another for endless weeks, scrimping, cutting back, tramping round a seemingly endless succession of boardrooms full of overly well-fed, silk-hatted men wearing cold, profiteer's smiles; coaxing, bullying, cajoling or downright begging commissions out of companies who were all battening down hatches for the duration and had no work to let. But he'd done it; when the gloom started to lift and the hammers' sound came back to the shipyards of Clydeside it was said of McAllister & Smalley that they'd never laid off a man if the owner could prevent it, and that he'd cut out his tongue before he let it give the order to make redundancies.

But that was well in the past now, and, besides, the vast empire of shipyards, foundries, rolling mills and assembly lines owned by the international conglomerate Davey answered to these days could swallow up McAllister & Smalley and all its workforce a thousand times over, and barely notice the difference. 

Davey, however, wasn't one for asking favours lightly. Nor for making mysteries where he needn't. McAllister had considered the matter with due care.

"Has he any experience bossing men? I'm no hiring hands just the minute, but my foreman's broken his leg; they say he'll be in hospital a month or more. And there's no-one I'd care to promote from the floor - especially not if I then have to demote them once Richards gets back in harness."

Davey had given a disapproving cluck. "Man, that's no way to run a business. Leave yourself short of a foreman, because you're soft to an injured man, and his family, and prepared to keep his job warm for who knows how long? And no doubt you'll be seeing to the hospital bills, also. I wonder you've not fair ruined yourself years ago."  
He'd laughed; it was an old, old argument between them and neither of them had given an inch of ground in fifty years. And Davey, reluctantly, had smiled too. And McAllister had agreed to meet his engineer, and see if he might, perhaps, do to take Richards' place for a few weeks.

The man was an American, which was a surprise; McAllister had watched a flood of skilled workers sail from the Clyde in the opposite direction, and only a mere trickle came back. Yes; there was some mystery here. There was something about the man's demeanour. He had the air of someone whose life's mainspring had been broken, and when he thought McAllister's eyes were off him he allowed his mouth to relax into lines which somehow conveyed an infinity of quiet desperation.

He was polite and quiet, though, meeting McAllister's tricky technical inquisition with the well drilled air of a Sunday schoolboy rattling off his catechism. And his hands were good; strong, square-tipped, calloused. Not someone afraid of hard work, McAllister had decided. And as for anything else; well, McAllister had never been one to pry into another's secret. If Providence chose that he should know about it, then Providence would enlighten him in its own good time.

He told Mikey to start as foreman tomorrow.

His first two days had been a success; the hands had taken to the novelty of being bossed by Yankee Mike, and he'd politely answered, or deflected their endless stream of questions; yes, it was true that in America there were cafes which actually opened early enough to serve you breakfast; no, he'd never actually met Jean Harlow, though he'd seen Katharine Hepburn once, stepping out of a car in front of Macy's; oh, he just fancied seeing Europe and working his passage was the only way to do it, and it wasn't as if he'd got family in America who were missing him, so he could please himself how long he took to do it.

And his work was all McAllister could have asked for. In Mikey's hands a lathe could sing, and a welding torch all but turn somersaults. And he had an instant eye for when a mod would work, and where it wouldn't. And a bottomless fund of ingenuity.

The more McAllister saw of him, the more he pondered. A mystery there, for sure. He was not, in the least, the calibre of man one ever expected to see in a small workshop on Clydeside, even one as respected for its workmanship as McAllister & Smalley.

Geordie McGeown, unfortunately, was.

McAllister pushed the door slightly wider. No-one down on the shop floor was looking up towards him. The silence - the chatter of the lathes and the turning of the screws were so much background as not to count as noise for any of them, though visitors declared themselves deafened within seconds - was heavy, ugly. A number of the men had stopped working and were grouped round Geordie and Mikey in a rough circle. He made a mental note to quarter-hour the lot of them.

Mikey's voice rang out across the workshop with cold authority. "And what do you call this, Geordie?"

Geordie squared his shoulders. "Man, some foreman y'are. Pure gone in the head, ye must be. Nae doubt that soft coca-cola ye Yankees drink instead of honest whisky's rotted your brains for ye. D'ye not recognise a weld when ye see one?"

He swayed closer, leaning in towards Mikey's face. Mikey held his ground. His voice was level.

"Sure I recognise a weld when I see one, Geordie." He paused, chewing his gum meditatively. "And, Geordie, I know a heap of shit when I see one, too. And you don't get to guess which one I think this is."

There was a collective indrawn breath around him. Geordie lurched even closer, within an inch of Mikey's face, and let loose a stream of obscenities, touching upon everything from Mikey's (presumed) parentage, to the (presumed) professions of his sister, mother and all his female relatives of lesser degree. Mikey rocked back slightly on his heels, and waited for him to run down to a stop. He put his head on one side, and looked up at the other through sparrow-bright dark eyes.

"Well, Geordie? And what's all that got to do with the price of butter?"

He picked up the tangled lump of metal from the bench without discernable effort, though McAllister knew it must have weighed twenty pounds or more.

"I don't care you were doing this on piece-work rates, Geordie. I don't care if your best girl was waiting for you to take her to the flicks tonight, and you were rushing to get through your quota before the hooter went. I don't care if you thought I was a soft-headed idiot who'd pass crap like this because you don't expect me to take on half the shop on my first week."

He exhaled, and thrust the metal hard at Geordie's chest, driving the other man back against the bench.

"What I do care is that what I'm holding here, Geordie - what you decided to apply your half-assed excuse for a precision weld to - is the blade for a de Laval steam turbine. Jeez! Have you any idea of the sort of psi this weld's going to have to stand up to in use? Have you? Ever seen a boiler burst, Geordie? Ever seen human flesh that's been boiled off human bones? Ever heard how a man screams who's had that happen to him? Well, multiply that at few times, when it's a disintegrating de Laval you're playing games with. That's the price of shoddy workmanship, Geordie. And metal doesn't make excuses or play favours."

He tossed the rejected blade over his shoulder, without looking where it fell. Two of the watching hands scrambled aside just in time. He started to roll up his sleeves.

"We'll finish this outside, Geordie. Now."

As a small gaggle of men moved, mesmerised, behind the combatants towards the door to the yard McAllister got up and, moving like a cat, pulled his door closed with infinite care. Somehow he rather thought his rescue efforts would be superfluous to requirements. And he had a lot of paperwork to get through. And it was nice to have a bit of time when the shop-floor was quiet for him to do it.

It was three hours after the closing hooter had sounded when he finally descended from the office. The machine shop was deserted - no, there was a pool of light at the end of one of the workbenches. He made his way over to where Mikey sat, surrounded by sculptured hunks of precision-machined metal. He had one in his hand, and appeared to be scrutinising its weld through a jeweller's eye-piece. He was so absorbed that it took McAllister's hand on his shoulder to alert him that he was no longer alone. Then he swirled round so fast that McAllister reflexively fell back a pace. Mikey raised his hand in front of his face in a rueful gesture.

"Jeez, sir, I'm sorry. You startled me."

McAllister let the ghost of a grin cross his lips. "We're out of hours now, laddie. Just McAllister will do."

His glance dropped to the bench. The hand that had been supporting the rotor blade as Mikey inspected it was beginning to swell; it looked puffy round the knuckles and the skin was broken. "Wait here a moment." 

He'd always made a point of having a well-stocked first aid room handy to the shop-floor; the arnica and the bandages were easy enough to find. Mikey accepted the first, but refused the second.

"Cap - I mean, someone I used to work with - said the men needed to think you didn't bruise or cut like any other man if you wanted to lead them. No matter what it took to keep up the pretence. With a bit of oil and grease on my hands in the morning I doubt they'll see it's hurt. But a bandage would be a dead giveaway, Mr - um - McAllister."

McAllister nodded, acknowledging the point. "Did he fight dirty?"

Mikey nodded. Then he gave the first real grin McAllister had ever seen on his face. "Mind you, so did I." He paused. "That gave me the advantage. I was expecting him to, but he didn't expect it of me." There was another pause. "I'm afraid you're out a hand. He - um - decided to ask for his cards." He paused again. "At least - I - um took the liberty of interpreting it that way. People aren't all that easy to understand with their two front teeth half-way down their throat."

The shy grin broadened. McAllister returned it with interest.

"Good. The Dear knows he's been a problem this many a month, but I'd have not have thought he'd stoop so low." He looked down at the turbine blades on the bench. "And these are all his batch?"

Mikey shrugged. "Maybe. I pulled all we have for checking, to be on the safe side."

There were forty-seven blades in stock; McAllister had signed off on the stock-check not forty minutes ago."Man! You'll be here half the night!"

There was a shade of bitterness about the other man's mouth. "That's OK. There's no-one sitting up waiting for me to get back. And I like working. Easier than thinking."

McAllister got to his feet. "Well, I'll be leaving you to it. The sooner you get back to it, the sooner you'll be done." He paused. "But if you give me leave, I'd be honoured to have your company tomorrow evening. We have a kind of club who get together every Thursday; have a wee bit of supper and listen to a lecture or have a debate." He waggled a finger. "Oh, you'll hear everything from red Bolshevik revolution to someone who reckons he's drawn the only original blueprint for the New Jerusalem, but they're good lads, too, among all their blether, with some fine brains among their crazy notions, and there's always room for another good engineer. I've never found a good engineer yet who was a truly bad man, ye ken. There's truth at the very heart of the science. Anyway, laddie, ye'll be very welcome."

Mikey looked - momentarily taken aback. Then he ducked his head, in a quick acknowledging gesture. His voice seemed, somehow, remote."I'll think about it -sir. Goodnight."

As McAllister pushed out through the workshop door into the fog he took a last glance back at Mikey bent over the rotor blades on the workbench, peering through his jeweller's eyepiece again. And it struck him - fanciful as the notion sounded - that he had never seen anyone so lonely.


	6. Joe pursues the missing prototype, and Polly pursues her own agenda

It took a day for the expected message to arrive, and when it did it was a phoned-through telegram.

WANT DEAL QUERY GO CITY STOP ADVISE YOUR LOCATION TOMORROWS CHRONICLE PERSONALS CODEWORD SWEETKITTEN STOP CONTACT YOU THERE STOP 

Joe wandered into the mess while breakfast was in progress and took his tray over to a packed table.

"Room for me here, boys?" he enquired, sliding into a seat as he was greeted with a chorus of questions, complaints and agitation. He waved an airy hand."Yes, no, I think so, haven't a clue and I'm taking it under advisement."

When the hubbub had died down a bit, he smiled and added, "Do you want the good news or the bad news?"

Without pausing for an answer, he went on,"Well, the good news is that quarantine's lifted from 10:30 am this morning, and the British Navy boys have given you all a clean bill of health, provided none of you starts quacking or squawking in the next couple of hours." He grinned. "The bad news is, if any of you were planning on using your freedom to visit the Lair tomorrow night, I'm pulling rank on you, OK?"

There was a predictable chorus of moans and ripe comments, mostly hammed up for effect. The Lair, the downtown apartment which formed an informal club-house for members of the Legion when in the city was theoretically open for exclusive booking to all of them, but by immutable custom there was only a tiny inner circle who took advantage of the privilege, and if you were in that circle you knew it. 

"Well, guys, see you later. I've some jobs to be getting on with."

The _Chronicle_ girl who took his call when he tried to place his personal ad turned out to be on her first day, and proved unexpectedly sticky about the immutability of the _Chronicle_ ads policy being strictly cash with order. And since he could hardly afford to delay a day until they got his seventy-five cents in their hot sticky hands (and apparently it would take that long, even if he sent it out in person on a motorbike, owing to some complication he couldn't understand and suspected she didn't either about when Accounts could "recognise" payment had been made) he had had, once pure charm had failed, to use the pull of his fame as Sky Captain to inveigle her into taking his ad for immediate publication. It gave him a pang of uneasiness, but he consoled himself that, from everything he'd ever heard, the luminaries of the Chronicle reporting staff might vaguely have heard that the ads department existed, but would be hard put to find them with a full-blown investigative team and a brace of bloodhounds.

There was a touch of frost in the air as he drove over the bridge towards the city at about 5pm the next day, and the trees that lined the roadside were a blaze of reds and golds. The road ahead of him was almost empty; the exodus of workers driving home to well-earned dinners in the suburbs flowed past him in the opposite direction, while the counter-tide of pleasure-seekers coming up to the city to dine and dance and lose themselves in the evening's whirl had yet to gather force.

As he drove he reviewed Davies' short list of those members of base personnel who'd left the base during the window of opportunity since the new prototype had been signed off on by Sandy, and Dex's detection of the substitution, and who'd done so in any form of transport capable of standing up to carrying the prototype.

There were six possibles, but, so far as Joe was concerned, only one probable: Grogan.

He hoped it wasn't just personal prejudice which made him finger the big Bostonian, but somehow he doubted it. They'd not hit it off from the beginning, for reasons he'd never been able to put his finger on (though he'd never got on with people who assumed that his opinions on certain political matters could be summed up in the fact that his surname was Sullivan, and anyway Franky's mother had lost a kid brother in a fire started by Land Leaguers, so despite his surname no-one was going to convince him in a hurry that the weight of atrocity sat wholly on one side of the scales).

Grogan was a character - that went with being in the Legion - and had a colourful past - that did, too - and if not all of his stories about it quite hung together, then that was also true of most of his fellows, even those without having the excuse of having kissed the blarney stone.

But - Joe shook his head. There was something about everything Grogan did that was subtly offkey, something that screamed "PHONEY" at him, without his having a shred of evidence to back him up. He'd asked Davies to have his people be very, very thorough indeed in checking out Grogan's connections, and he'd taken care to send a few rabbits down a few holes himself.

The results - he smiled grimly to himself - had been not without interest.

He left the car in its accustomed place, nodded briskly to the uniformed attendant sitting at the desk in the lobby of the managed apartment block in which the Lair was situated, and signed for the Tiffany gift-wrapped parcel he'd ordered yesterday, and which they'd delivered, as requested, to the front desk that afternoon. He tucked it into his jacket pocket, and ignored the lift in favour of a brisk sprint up three flights of stairs.

He had barely started to turn the key in the lock when the nagging doubt in his gut became an absolute certainty.

The door was already unlocked. 

He moved soundlessly to the bank of switches near the lift, and switched off the lights in the corridor. Tiptoeing back in the darkness, he eased open the door of the apartment just enough to insert his hand, and flicked the light-switch down. 

What he saw in the sudden blaze of illumination caused him to groan, audibly. He pushed the door wide.

Wholly unfazed, Polly looked up from where she was sitting on the sofa. He spotted a folded copy of today's _Chronicle_ on the cushion next to her: somehow, he didn't think she'd been whiling away the time by doing the crossword.

"How did you get in here?" he demanded, not particularly because he was interested in the answer, but because it seemed to be important that he have the first words in this exchange.

She smiled; not the rare flash of genuine warmth and tenderness which could light her from within, and which, despite all that had happened between them, still had the power to move him to his bones, making him want to hammer a way through the frozen fortress of her professional poise and free the flesh-and-blood girl who was imprisoned within, the girl who could still laugh, and weep, and love, but that other smile, the falsely genial, superior curl of her lips which always set his teeth on edge, even before she'd said a word.

"Charm." She put her head on one side. "And a hairpin. Don't blame that nice man at the desk, Joe. When I told him what number apartment I was looking for, he didn't seem to have any difficulty believing me when I told him I'd got a key."

Her voice was razor-blades concealed in black velvet."So, Joe? Who is she?"

For a moment he was nonplussed. She gestured. "Please, Joe. Stop playing games with me. Oh and "Sweetkitten"? I thought, at least after meeting Franky, that you had better taste in floozies than that."

There was an awful pause. Then, as Joe guessed the nature of Polly's error, it hit a mental nerve, and he collapsed into the nearest armchair, overcome by helpless guffaws.She looked across at him as though she'd met more personable cockroaches.

"Oh, Polly!" A tinge of affection leaked through the exasperation in his voice. "You couldn't possibly think this whole elaborate set up is an assignation, could you?"

She looked at him. "Well? What else was I supposed to think?"

Joe coughed, pointedly.""That's interesting but none of my business" would have made a nice change."

She glared at him. He sighed. "Believe me, I wish it was - anything but what it is. Polly; what I've got to deal with here is a serious leak of confidential material from the base. And I'm here to get it back."

She leaned forwards towards him, her eyes sparkling. "That's the truth? You swear, Joe, you're not putting me on?"

He nodded. "Cross my heart."

Polly pursed her lips. "Well, Joe, why didn't you tell me you suspected you'd got a leak of secrets?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Ah - for much the same reason that my natural response to a dripping tap isn't to turn on the nearest fire hydrant?" 

"Count me in, Joe, please. I can help - we can work together on this one - we can pool our information sources -"

Joe had a brief mental picture of attempting to pool Polly with Surgeon-Commander Davies, and practically choked. Fortunately, at this moment there was a brisk knock at the door of the apartment, and a voice from the corridor outside said, "Message for Mr Sullivan."

The envelope was a plain, cheap white one, bearing just his name, typewritten. He ripped it open and read the short message made up of pasted together words from newspapers inside, and had a quick glance at the chrono on his wrist. Twenty minutes to the rendevous; it was going to be tight. COME ALONE. Well, a bad idea on general principles, but one which suited him down to the ground at the moment.

His smile could have matched hers for shallow insincerity."Excuse me a moment, Polly." 

He palmed the message into his hand and went through the door which led to the bedroom, leaving it ajar, and then through into the adjoining bathroom. He locked the bathroom door, and, running water to conceal the sound, lifted up the frosted-glass sash window.Like all airmen, he had a healthy respect for the dangers of fire, and one of the primary attractions which had induced him to sign the lease for the Lair had been the convenient proximity of the building's fire escape to the back of the apartment.

He held the message out into the darkness, letting the light from the bathroom fall on it so it could be read. A discreet cough from the fire-escape conveyed MESSAGE RECEIVED AND UNDERSTOOD.

He turned off the tap, shut the window, and came out through the bedroom into the sitting room."Sorry, Polly, have to dash. And the nice men with black hats tell me this one's strictly a stag affair. So if I'm free later, perhaps we could have supper together, go dancing?"

He was backing towards the stairs as he spoke, and his long legs and advantage in footwear got him the start on Polly to the street. There was a cab passing; he flagged it and muttered the address he had been given to the driver. They shot off into the night, and tried a few random twists and turns, but even as he neared the warehouse distict chosen for the rendezvous he was left with an unmistakable sense there was another car on his tail.

He shrugged. He'd done his best, and if Polly wanted to thrust her head into a hornet's nest, let her.

With any luck at all he ought to be able to tackle whatever was waiting for him, and keep her out of serious danger.

And retrieve the base's secrets intact, and without letting too much slip.

Probably.

Possibly, at any rate.


	7. Confrontation in a warehouse: Joe reaches a conclusion and Davies causes a diversion

The warehouse was an echoing place, the hoists and pulleys of its workaday existence casting shadows on the walls that looked like gallows in the harsh glare of the overhead lights.

As promised, they were waiting. There were four goons standing over the prototype: overkill, in Joe's opinion. It was hardly as if it was that hard to lift. He ignored the hired muscle and concentrated on the skinny ginger youth with bad skin, who stood a little apart from the others, his hand inside his jacket, a sneer on his face that made Joe heartily wish to rearrange his dentristy for him.

He made his walk an easy, unhurried stride as he strolled towards them. About ten yards away he stopped, his hands loosely at his sides, his weight on the balls of his feet, a genial and wholly fake smile on his face.

"Well, well, well. What do I have here? A barber-shop quartet complete with your actual original barber's cat, it looks like to me. Want a saucer of milk, Ginger?"

The ginger youth's sneering smile deepened. "Huh. Looks like we've got ourselves a comedian here, guys. Well, see if you're still smiling after this!"

He whipped his hand out from inside his jacket pocket, revealing - a narrow envelope sealed with a blob of red sealing wax.

Joe didn't blink, and thought he detected a trace of annoyance from the ginger lad at his _sang-froid_. He couldn't see why: it would have been rather counter-productive to go to all this trouble to bring him to the meeting and then shoot him before he'd had time to do more than utter a rather feeble wisecrack.

"Why, isn't that sweet of you, Ginger? But if you were going to send me a birthday card, they should have told you it isn't 'til next month."

Ginger shifted from one foot to another; plainly he was getting bored with the backchat. Joe couldn't blame him, though etiquette demanded that he spin the preliminaries out as long as possible.

"You'll laugh the other side of your face when you see what present the Boss got for you," Ginger warned, making a game attempt to come back from 30-love down. 

For public consumption, Joe raised a bored eyebrow."Oh? And do I get to see it anytime soon, or are we both going to stand here playing Guess 'til you grow up enough to start shaving?"

One of the goons emitted an unscheduled snigger, earning himself a quelling glance from Ginger. Joe winked at him matily.

Ginger set his teeth. "Well? Would you like to see them?"

Joe shrugged. "Well, it might be a bit more interesting than looking at your pimples all evening. I'm game. Fire away."

Ginger slid a long thumb under the seal, and broke it. He passed the envelope across to Joe.

"Enjoy," he said.

There were four photographs in the envelope; only prints, of course. He hadn't, Joe told himself firmly, really expected that they'd have brought the negatives: Grogan - if it was Grogan - had far too many brains to take a risk like that even if he did like to come the thick Paddy if he thought it might get him out of inconvenient duties. 

The ginger youth craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse of the photographs (not deep in the plot, then). Joe deliberately angled them towards his own body for better concealment as he glanced down at them. It was as well he'd had years of training in keeping a poker face. They were worse even than he'd expected. And if they ever got into the hands of the Vice cops -

Idly, he turned over the top print, making as if the back was of at least as much interest to him as the front, neither side being especially gripping -

He suppressed a triumphant exclamation as several pieces of the jigsaw fell into place at once.

The photographic paper was watermarked. 

The Legion got through reams of photographic supplies with their reconnaissance photographs, to say nothing of Dex's experiments, all of which had to be meticulously recorded.  
Their cameras and the precious intelligence captured by them were practically as important to the Legion as their weapons. It had been worth their while having fine grades of photographic paper developed exclusively to meet their exacting specifications and watermarked with the Legion's crest.

These prints had been made on the base. He and Davies had thought it was possible; after all, it was not, given what they had surmised about the nature of them, as if whoever had taken them could send them to a professional laboratory. They'd accordingly pulled l the records of dark room use over the relevant period.

With the precise satisfaction he felt when the third bearing in a three point fix plotted with pin-point accuracy on top of the other two, Joe realised his hunch had to have been right.

Of all the people who'd left the base during the window of opportunity, and all the people who'd used the dark room over the preceding few days, Grogan's was the only name appearing on both lists.

Joe wasn't looking for the negatives with the whole city to search in any more.

Just for a plain old fashioned needle in a haystack.

And any fool knew that the way you found a needle in a haystack was with a magnet. 

"Well," Joe said, tucking the prints back into the envelope and putting it into his jacket pocket, his knuckles brushing against the little gift-wrapped Tiffany packet as he did so, "I've seen one half of what your Boss wants to put on the table. Let's see the other half's the genuine article, then."

He turned, quickly, before the ginger youth could summon up the gumption to object to his casual appropriation of the prints, ran a quick proprietorial hand over the top of the prototype, and hunkered down to examine its sides and base. He was careful not to direct unwelcome attention by too close a scrutiny, but it was with relief that he noted that no-one seemed to have touched the little metal plaque, bearing a serial number and maintenance instructions, which was screwed in an unobtrusive spot on the lower side of the machine. No: those screws had definitely not been touched; Dex had taken care that their heads were made of a much softer alloy than the stainless steel they appeared to be, and they had left-hand threads, too. Anyone who'd tried to remove the plaque couldn't have failed to leave traces.

He straightened up, sneaking a quick look at his chrono as he did so. 

"Well," he said slowly, "I've seen the goods. I'd say they were -"

He paused for a carefully-timed four seconds. "Of some interest to me. Up to a point. At the right price, I might be prepared to do a deal. So why don't you tell me your Boss's opening price, so that I can get the shrieks of hollow laughter out of the way, and then we can start talking real business?"

Ginger sneered. "The Boss says he's got an opening price and a closing price. And they're both the same price, and he isn't about to haggle. And the deal is: you agree to keep us supplied with more of the same - and you get the pretty pictures with the negatives, and we don't tell Uncle Sam that this little beauty -" He patted the prototype lovingly. "Has ever been on an unscheduled vacation. Deal?"

Before Joe had time to say anything the door at the far end of the warehouse crashed open, and a bewildered, very Cockney voice, slurring slightly, said to someone unseen behind him, "You sure that bloke at Cosy Rosie's wasn't having you on, Bert? It's a bleeding funny place for a boozer, that's all I can say."

Another voice; assured, confident and with vowels that bespoke Birmingham with every word, said,"Nah; I've been here before. It's just what they have to do round here to get a drink, like. Otherwise, the rozzers bust it up."

"Bloody daft way to run a country," a Yorkshire voice commented. 

A dozen or so sailors - looking to be well set for an epic first evening of shore leave, despite unfavourable circumstances - spilled through the door into the warehouse, blinking in the harsh lights, and peering around in a bewildered search for the promised party. The goons - albeit equally befuzzled - grabbed the prototype and started legging it towards the rear door. 

"Them mucking bleeders is legging it with the booze!" carolled someone from the back.The sailors, whooping and yelling, pounded across the warehouse. 

Ginger took advantage of the momentary distraction to make a quick lunge at Joe's pocket, twitching the envelope out in his finger-tips, and diving towards the emergency exit at the top of a flight of steps to his left. Abandoning the prototype, Joe went after Ginger, rugby tacking him round his legs and bringing him down in a crashing heap just as he was pushing the door to the street open. Down on the floor of the warehouse battle raged.

There was a sudden shout of shock, rage and indignation.

"Watch it!"

"Bloody mad bastard's got a gun -!"

The squat evil shape of the automatic in the leading goon's hand spoke once. The bank of switches in the corner burst apart in a shower of sparks and all the lights went out. 

Ginger kicked out frantically, to release himself from Joe's grasp; Joe grabbed the envelope back from him, and, successful, broke away. His own gun was suddenly in his hands, pointed straight at Ginger's chest.

"Now," he purred, "don't do anything hasty. I've got the photographs; you've got the machine. How about we call it a draw, and go our separate ways, hm?"

Ginger, breathing heavily, sneered at him.

"Don't know how you figure it, but it sure looks like a win from where I'm standing. We've got the machine and we've still got the negatives. Those prints aren't worth nothing to you."

"As bright as he's beautiful, that's what your old mother used to tell the neighbours, I bet," Joe said. "Suppose you stop informing me of the startlingly obvious, and beat it? I've about had enough of your company. Push off, Ginger, and tell your Boss I'm not interested in dealing. Scram!"

He gestured dangerously with the gun. Ginger took no second chances. He was off through the door and haring along the street. Back in the warehouse the sounds of the fight were dying away; Joe guessed that the goons had taken advantage of the darkness to make off with the prototype. 

Still, it wasn't as though that was something he needed to worry about at the moment. He had other, more pressing concerns. He went out through the emergency exit, moving at a brisk trot to the nearest well-lit thoroughfare, where he flagged down a passing taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Algonquin Hotel.


	8. In search of answers, Joe pays a visit to a lady

He spotted Davies as soon as he arrived in the hotel lobby, at a little mahogany table behind a potted palm, and reading the latest PG Wodehouse. He had no doubt that Franky's intelligence officer had noted him, too, but neither of them acknowledged the other's existence. He collected his room key, was informed that his luggage had arrived and already been sent up to his room; and headed upstairs.

He showered, and had reached the stage of wrestling with the studs of his stiff white shirt front when he heard the expected coded pattern of knocks on the door.

He let Davies in, and gestured towards the envelope he'd tossed onto the bed. "We were right. Prints on Legion paper."

"Good." Davies' smile had a touch of the vulpine. He reached inside his own jacket, and dropped another envelope onto the bed.

Joe raised an eyebrow. "You got something?"

Davies nodded. "There's a plain, conscientious, hardworking girl up in Boston, with a knack for matching patterns and linking obscure connections. The sort of girl who thinks in double-acrostics, and who never gets a date because the men all think she's "too serious to know what fun means." If she knows of you at all, it's from the newspaper columns, and your occasional incursions into Gaumont British or Pathe News. And when we hire her, she thinks she's being hired by a daft old buffer of a Doctor so-and-so with a German name, and a magnum opus which may never see the light of day, and if it does it will be read by three mad Professors and the particularly intelligent cat belonging to the Master of Trinity." He coughed. "But nevertheless: her unique skills have probably been worth at least a cruiser and two destroyers to the British Empire, over the last five years. But don't tell her. She might ask for a pay rise."

His eyes on Joe were needle-bright. "And also: she may just have saved your Legion. She's spent the last three days fossicking in the Massachussetts Records Office. On our instructions. And she's turned up pure gold. Here."

He looked down at the envelope containing the photographs. "Want me to take charge of those, in case you get into another rough-house this evening? After all, it's not as if it's the sort of thing you want to mislay in a hurry."

Despite himself, Joe felt his face twist in a wry, bitter grimace. "No. I'd say not."

Davies shot him a sidelong look, and then reached inside his jacket again, this time producing a hip-flask. With a series of precise, almost fussy movements he located a couple of tooth-mugs, and poured a generous slug into each of them, pushing one of them across to Joe. 

"Here." The fumes of neat brandy rose powerfully from the tooth-mug. Joe raised it in a toast.

"Thanks. To law-breaking, and confusion to the Eighteenth Amendment!"

Davies' brows rose. "I can assure you, Mr Sullivan, that as an officer of His Majesty's Navy the last thing I could feel able to do would be to commit or sanction a breach of local law on the sovereign territory of a friendly Power." He patted his pocket. "I am, of course, as a fully qualified medical practitioner quite entitled to prescribe spirits where in my professional judgment I consider them to be therapeutically indicated. I'll write you out the prescription in full if you're troubled in your conscience."

His bantering tone turned to something wholly serious, with a note of driving urgency."Which, leaving social and political convenience apart for once, I as a matter of fact do. That is, you young idiot, I haven't failed to notice that over the last few days your world's been radically overturned, with enormous pressure on you to cope, and the severest imaginable consequences of failure, while at the very same time you have been faced with the unexpected deprivation of vital elements of your normal support structure."

He gave a dry cough, and took a sip of his own brandy. "And you are, of course, coping admirably.That is; exactly as someone who's earned the soubriquet "Sky Captain" might be expected to do. Namely, by pretending nothing out of the ordinary has occurred at all. Naturally. Anything else would betray the tradition of the stiff upper lip."

Davies took another swallow of his brandy. "In 20 years experience of acting as a medical advisor to people of your type, I never cease to be amazed by the sheer number and variety of the psychosomatic downstream effects which result from compliance with that peculiarly malignant fallacy."

Joe thought it was high time to hit back. "So; in your considered medical judgment hitting the bottle is the solution?"

Davies looked at him, quellingly. "No, Mr Sullivan. Merely an acknowledgment of the existence of the problem. Which is, after all, in and of itself a start. Anyway don't let my ramblings keep you. You haven't a lot of time. The first house begins at 9pm."

Joe nodded, gulped down the rest of his brandy, shrugged on his tuxedo jacket and deployed the Tiffany box, the envelope Davies had brought, and his gun about his person."Can you lock up here?"

Davies nodded. Joe caught up his raincoat, and went. It was easy enough to get the bell-hop to order him a cab, and his destination was no more than a few minutes away. He would, after all, be in ample time for the first house.

O'Donnell'shad aimed for a calculated blend of the sophisticated and the folksy. Judging by the opulence of the limosines dropping patrons at its doors, and the Chanels and Schiaparellis among the throng at the little tables in the blue-hazed nightclub, the blend had been calculated exactly right.

Getting a table might have been more of a problem had the _maitre d'_ not abruptly recognised his face - he found himself, incongrously, blessing Polly - after which he was led without question to a table on the edge of the small dance-floor, not thirty feet from the stage.

It was then 8.47pm.

 

The blue velvet curtains were chastely shut. Joe ordered a ginger-ale, and waited.  
At 9.00pm precisely the band began to play, the curtains swung back, the band segued into a frantically triumphant swing beat, and the cabaret dancers hit the stage.

In Joe's (broad) experience they struck him as too clothed for Shanghai, too unsubtle for Paris, and too unambiguous for Berlin. They were, however, very definitely within normally acceptable tolerances of female pulchritude. There were whoops and howls from the darkness of the back. They finished their routine, hoofing off the small stage sideways. The cabaret was enveloped in darkness. The curtains swung back together.

A frosted spot suddenly came out of the blackness to feature stage centre. From the wings, a tuxedo-clad figure strode across the stage.

"And now - ladies and gentlemen - the moment we've all been waiting for. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you - Kathleen - no, she tells me she's Kitty to her friends, and that those of you here tonight who haven't been here before aren't strangers - she thinks of you as merely the friends she hasn't met yet. So, ladies and gentlemen: I give you - the internationally renowned - the remarkable - the adorable - the fantastic - Kitty O'Farrell, the sweet colleen from Ballinaslough!"

The orchestra drummed; the curtains parted.

There was a moment of dead silence in O'Donnell's.

A fragile figure in a blue satin evening dress that clung and draped in ways that were intended to convince one that dressmaking was one of the Dark Arts (and which almost succeeded) stepped out into the frosted spot, to the very edge of the stage, and began to sing.

The voice had the sweetness of honey, and the roughness of honey, too: there was no artificial refinement here. And her top notes opened doors onto wild wildernesses where Ancient Powers held sway, and under the primeval moonlight Cuchulainn met Fergus at the ford, and the three sons of Ulster went down by the betrayer's hand into the dark.  
There were audible sniffs and sobs into the darkness. It was possible, Joe thought, that they had all simultaneously worked out exactly what the shadowy owners of O'Donnell's were currently charging them for ginger-ale, which was, in his unbiased opinion, something it was quite reasonable to cry over, but he thought not.

Somehow Miss Kitty O'Farrell had hit upon that rarest of gifts; of striking in directly to a shared nerve. She radiated sincerity, from the tips of her tiny toes to the ends of her golden hair.

Joe had not, previously, had much truck with nostalgia, but he could watch, in the half glimpsed faces around the cabaret floor, the burning compulsion of the myths of the Lone Shieling, and the Auld Grey Hame in The West, along with the Forty Shades of Green, even though he'd be willing to bet that less than one in a hundred had ever been anywhere near the Emerald Isle, and that the remaining one percent had gone to considerable pains to put several thousand miles of ocean between them and it.

When the lights went up, he summoned the waiter.

"Would you be so good as to take a message from me to Miss O'Farrell?" he enquired. He slid the Tiffany box onto the waiter's tray . He also took care to add a five dollar bill. "And, of course, ask if she'd do me the favour of allowing me to buy her a drink between shows."

He waited. 

The passage of Miss O'Farrell through the night-club was that of royalty through worshipping peasantry. She had none of the haughtiness of royalty, though: she acknowledged her subjects' adoration with shy smiles, quick, gentle words, and a bashful ducking of her head. As she arrived at Joe's table and he stood to help her into her chair he felt the concentrated jealous loathing of half an hundred red-blooded men focussed intensely upon him. He grinned serenely, and resumed his own seat.

Miss O'Farrell was, he noticed, wearing the Tiffany bangle. And he'd guessed right, too, about the sapphires; they caught and emphasised the intense blue of her eyes. But he'd been wrong about her, he realised. Her impassioned invocation of a mythical Celtic past was not merely part of the calculated stage persona of an ordinary little gold-digger, using her voice and her looks to claw her way up from the slums to the heights. She radiated absolute, unquestioned belief: that was what captured her audience and set her apart from the others.

Give her the right opportunity, and she would throw herself into her cause with all the passion and lack of regard for self of a latter-day Joan of Arc.

He changed what he'd been planning to say. "Miss O'Farrell. Sean tasked me with coming out to see you, to bring his apologies, when he got tied up at the base this evening. He asked me to do him a favour: I had no idea what a pleasure it would turn into."

His eye dropped to the thin band of gold that encircled her alabaster wrist. "Oh; and Sean also asked me to make sure that that got to the right place. Promise to tell him I did the job, will you, Miss O'Farrell? After all, I can't think of anywhere it ought to be that could conceivably be better than where it is."

She turned her bangle round on her wrist, to look at the little cluster of sapphires.

"I'm so glad," she murmured. "You see, I was a little afraid when it arrived that perhaps you - had misunderstood my position. Some men do, you know." Her eyes dropped to the bangle again. "And it's so pretty. It would have broken my heart to have had to tell you I couldn't possibly keep it."

Joe smiled, and made an acknowledging nod. "Perhaps, when we get a chance to know one another better, you'll let me buy you the earrings that match it? In the meantime, may I have the pleasure of a dance, Miss O'Farrell?"

She turned in her seat, her eyes melting up at him. Her voice was husky. "The pleasure would be all mine - Sky Captain."

He took her hand as with infinite grace she rose to her feet. "And please," she breathed as they took the floor, "please call me Kitty."

They revolved round the floor with an ease and grace that made it look as though they had practised daily for years. As the orchestra started to play a slow number he leaned over Kitty's flawless bare shoulder and breathed into her ear, "There was another errand Sean entrusted to me tonight, you know."

She turned, her lovely eyes puzzled. 

Joe leaned closer. "Only this errand isn't for Sean himself. He asked me to ask you this in the name of the Shan Van Voght."

She twisted in his arms, her eyes darkening with shock."So you're with us after all? Sean said he could never be sure of you - of whether you were really for the Cause or not."

He summoned up into his face all the naked sincerity that had ever helped him get away with a bare-faced lie in his entire career to date. "Sure, and what to the contrary might you raisonably expect from a man of the surname of Sullivan?" he enquired in an outrageous brogue, drawing upon his memories of Father Nolan, the bane of his childhood life, and of his vernacular appeals to his down-at-heel West London constituency.

Kitty let out a peal of laughter, and he felt himself relaxing; he always knew that he was in with a better-than-evens chance if he could make them laugh on that particular note.

"That - um - thing - that you're looking after for Sean -?"

From her involuntary twitch of shock in his arms, that meant something. His nerves sang with the nearness of victory.

They executed a flawless double-chassėe before she found her voice.

"Ye-es?"

"We need it. For the Cause. Tonight."

She broke away for him momentarily, her hand going to her lips. "Holy Mother of God! It begins so soon?"

He made a brief, non-committal shrug. She took it as she had hoped.

"After this dance, I have to go back to change for the second house anyway. Give me five minutes, and then go backstage, to my dressing room. I'll give them orders to let you through. I'll give it to you there."

He nodded. And then the music stopped.

Backstage was a squalid warren, harshly lit and smelling vaguely of dry rot, drains, and damp. Kitty's dressing room, tiny though it was, was a haven of scent, light and comfort.   
She was at a cubby-hole concealed in the wall as he knocked and was admitted, and she spun on the spot, holding out to him an yellow envelope sealed with a now-familiar red blob of sealing wax.

"Here."

Cautiously, he broke the seal and verified the contents.

The negatives.

He was giddy with relief. He was going out now, and if he could find a booky to take his bet, he was going to bet large on the wildest speculation at the longest odds he could find. For tonight, Lady Luck was sitting on his shoulder, and he knew himself to be invincible.He turned to Kitty, and realised from her reaction that his emotions must be blazing in his face.

"Sweet Jesus! It was that important to the Cause? Sean never said - he just asked me to look after it for him - it was that important?"

He nodded, momentarily hating himself even as for once this evening he told nothing more that the precise and exact truth.

"It was that important. In the wrong hands, the contents of that envelope could have destroyed more people than you could possibly have imagined. Thank you for discharging your trust as you have."

That, clearly, was not enough for Kitty. She caught him passionately in her arms."No. Thank you. And may God go with you. In the name of the Cause, and of Kathleen Mavoureen, for whom I was named."

She kissed him violently on the lips. Much to his relief, he heard the callboy in the distance, warning the performers for the second house.

"Goodbye. Thank you. And believe me -"

He flung all his sincerity into his eyes again. "Believe me, Ireland will one day rejoice for what you've done tonight."

As he made his escape out through the stage door he consoled his uneasy conscience with the thought that so far as he could see here, the bad guys were trying to play poker with the fate of nations and if, as was all too probable, he would shortly be called upon to save the world, then the saving of the fledgling Republic of Ireland would, as it were, come up with the rations.


	9. Joe places a telephone call, Polly posits a Theory, and last chapter's chickens come home to roost

The door to the Lair was open again when he returned; a thin line of light spilled out onto the corridor. He had a fairly shrewd idea who it was likely to be but nevertheless his gun was in his hand as he nudged the door further open with his foot.

Polly looked up from the _Chronicle_ which was balanced on her knee. With a flicker of amusement he noted that by this time she evidently had been there long enough to have become sufficiently bored to start on the crossword. If she was surprised to see he'd changed she didn't show it. She had, too; from the immaculately tailored business suit she'd been wearing earlier to a bias-cut satin sheath with a bugle-beaded trim to the bodice. It looked like she was intending to hold him to his flippant offer to take her dancing. 

Which was all very well, but he suspected there was one more interview he needed to be prepared for that evening. And he most definitely did not want to have Polly within eavesdropping range of that one. Still, there was nothing he could really do about it without triggering Polly's lethal curiosity.

"Give me a couple of minutes," he said. He went through into the bedroom, this time kicking the door shut behind him. The bathroom window squeaked a little as he thrust it up, and he cursed under his breath, and hurriedly turned the tap on. 

"Yes?" a cautious whisper came from the fire escape.

"Yes," he confirmed. He passed the envelope containing the negatives out through the window, and was surprised to receive a scrap of paper with a telephone number scrawled on it in exchange.

 

"The Old Lady told me to tell you she'd appreciate an update. She's going to be on that number for the next two hours."

Joe nodded, closed the window and stole quietly towards the telephone by the side of the bed. He lifted the handset and grimaced at the cheerfully indiscreet "ping" it emitted. Keeping his voice low, he called the operator and asked if he might place a priority long-distance call.

He was surprised to find the phone, once connected, being answered by some remote flunky who announced that he was through to Big Trout Lake Resort Hotel, which on closer interrogation turned out to be somewhere in the remoter reaches of upstate Vermont.

Yes, Commander Cook was indeed staying at the hotel. Yes, the flunky could certainly get her for sir, if sir cared to hold for a moment.

At the far end of the line he heard a faint sound, presumably as the handset was placed down on a counter while the flunkey went off in search of Franky. And in the sudden silence Joe heard the sound he'd been half-dreading; the faintest possible click as the handset of the extension in the living room was lifted. 

"Joe? Is that you?" 

The familiar crisp tones on the other end of the line told him Franky had been found. With Polly's ears flapping on the line, he couldn't afford to risk her unwittingly blurting Dex's secrets. 

"Franky, what on earth are you doing in Vermont?"

"I came here for the skiing."

"Franky! It's mid October. There isn't going to be any snow for another two months."

"I was misinformed." He could almost hear the dismissive shrug in her voice.

He ground his teeth. "Franky! I haven't got time for this. I only called to let you know we've retrieved the microfilm."

There was a pause of several seconds. A thinking pause.

Silently, Joe blessed Franky for what he had always appreciated about her; her razor-sharp intelligence, and the fact that unlike practically any other woman of his acquaintance she had the ability to apply her brains to reach a conclusion and act decisively on it without the need to waste time on camouflaging her own brilliance so as to appear ladylike.  
Her voice, when she spoke again, was calm and level.

"You got it back? Good. I'm sure Dex will be relieved to hear that."

She was feeding him his straight lines, bless her. He licked his dry lips. "I'm sure he will. When I find him. Look Franky; heaven knows he's earned a holiday -"

She interrupted him, her voice loaded with meaning. 

"It was hardly just a holiday. Surgeon-Commander Davies advised me that given the - the pressure he's evidently been put under - that had he been asked to do so, he would unquestionably have signed him off active duties for the foreseeable future." Her official voice changed; became warmer, more genuine. There was even a hint of advocacy about it.  
"He's a good man, Joe, one of the best, and when I saw him last he was the nearest I've ever seen him to cracking up."

He knew this was a conversation he could not afford to pursue, not with that silent, listening presence hanging on the other extension. But nonetheless -

"If only he'd waited - come to me - to talk about the - pressure he was under -"

Franky's voice could have stripped furniture."Waited till you got back from whichever extended trip you'd been on this time? Central Asian Republics, wasn't it? I mean, I'd be the last person to criticise how you choose to discharge your command, but you might want to consider the next time you've got time to think about it when you're on one of these extended flights between everywhere from Yellowknife to Uttar Pradesh that you've taken to going off on, that it strikes me that for the last few months Dex has pretty much been doing two people's jobs, both of them exceptionally tough ones."

That stung. And the more so because it was true, and even more than that because of the listening presence on the line, with her perilous misapprehensions about what a fleeting moment at the end of a time of inconceivable stress meant, or didn't mean, and the impossibility of extricating himself from the current mess of half-baked, half-unspoken assumptions and expectations without tears and recriminations on a scale which he quailed at contemplating.

Oh God. He only wished he'd been granted the time for such analysis.

Franky managed to get in while he was still flailing.

"In fact, Joe," she added with that air of being a condescending elder sister that, in the end, had put an obstacle to their continued relationship that six months in a Manchurian slave camp had failed to do, "it seems to me that most of the pressures Dex has been under recently have been down to you, one way or the other."

Whatever the constraints on their conversation at present, he wasn't going to let that one pass. "I'm hardly responsible for the - " he caught his words just in time. "For the pressures on him about the microfilm business." 

There was a speaking pause from Vermont. With an air of restraint, Franky said, "No? Joe, for someone I've personally seen shoot the pips out of the six of diamonds at 20 paces, there are times when I get bloody flabbergasted at what you manage to not to spot that's right under your nose."

He wasn't entirely clear what she meant by that one; he'd have to think it over. "Anyway, Franky, stop playing games. Leave or no leave, I need to get hold of Dex to tell him about the microfilm. So where is he?"

There was a carefully measured pause. "How on earth would I know? The last I saw of him was over a week ago, when he hopped a lift on that civvie cargo shipment we were sending back to the UK. After all, why bother paying your passage if you can work it? Presumably they notionally signed him up as a supernumenary engineer and they swapped mods and tolerances the whole way across the Atlantic. I've absolutely no idea where he's got to now."

If Joe knew one thing about Franky, it was that while she could equivocate with the best, she almost never came out with a bare-faced lie. Especially when she might end up being shown to have lied.

So if Franky said she didn't know where Dex was, then - she probably had made sure she didn't.

Damn and blast and bloody hell.

"Well, thanks for that."

Franky's voice rang with false cheer and the local idiom."You're very welcome. Have a nice evening."

"Oh, I'm sure I shall." A trifle maliciously, he added, "Anyway, I have to go. I'm going dancing with Polly."

Franky's voice on the other end of the line was serene; almost euphoric."Oh, wise choice. You've been under so much stress, something pleasantly undemanding like Polly's conversation sounds like just what the doctor ordered."

He bit his lip. And then a small, terse inhalation, rapidly suppressed, from the unscheduled other listener made him suddenly see the funny side. His voice was at least as relaxed as Franky's as he said, "Quite. Exactly. Anyway, Franks, do look me up when you're next in town, won't you?"

"My pleasure," a clipped accent said. "I look forward to it."

The line went dead.

When he got back in the living room Polly was conspicuously standing by the window, as far from the extension to the telephone as possible. He coughed.

"Anyway, should we be on our way?"

She tuned to him. "Joe, there's something I've been wondering - I should have asked you about earlier. How's Dex?"

He wasn't sure whether to laugh or to spit in fury. Instead, he shrugged."Well, he's on leave at the moment. After all, he's got enough to accrued to take the next two years off it he chose to, and he needed the break."

She tapped the copy of the _Chronicle_ which she was still holding. "Look, Joe, don't you think it's slightly - odd - that he's chosen to go on vacation right now? With everything that's going on?"

His gut churned. If Polly started ferreting in that direction - and trying to make connections - goodness only knew what she'd turn up. "Why do you say that?" 

"Well; I was just thinking. Dex is so - well, outside his workshop and his comic books he's so - well, innocent. Naive."

With an effort, Joe kept his face immobile, politely interested. "Um?"

She gestured with the newspaper. "There's a feature today; about the profile of the sort of people the Communists specifically target. Look; it could have been written about Dex, Joe." She waved a hand to silence Joe's automatic exclamation of protest. "Our writer said the sort of guys they're after are the sort of idealistic, brilliant types whose heads are always in the lab, and who aren't really aware of what's going on in the real world at all. He couldn't name names, but he told me off the record thathe knows there's at least two Nobel laureates who've got tangled up in Trotskyite circles - not realising what they were getting into - and now of course they're in too deep to get out, and they're being terrorised into handing over all sorts of classified stuff. Look, Joe; surely it's not a coincidence that Dex has gone off on this sudden holiday just as you've detected a leak of secrets from the base?"

His face hardened. "Polly, are you seriously suggesting that Dex is a traitor?"

She flushed, and dropped her eyes from his direct gaze.

"Well," she mumbled, "it might be he didn't know what he was getting into until it was too late. Look, Joe; if someone who he trusted - someone he met at some eggheads' get-together, say - fed him a line about the collaborating for the greater good of humanity - he might easily fall for it without even realising it was a Communist plot. After all, they don't draw Reds as absent-minded professors in the comic books."

With an effort, Joe suppressed his instinctive, furious defence of Dex. If Polly succeeded in drawing him out on those lines, who knew what he might find himself saying?

She, in turn, seemed conscious of having stepped over a line." I'm not saying he is: just that it's a possibility you need to consider."

He shrugged. His face must have caught the light; Polly's head went up like a pointer dog scenting game. She caught his chin in his hand, and turned his face towards her. At the expression which came into her eyes he felt an inward shudder. He was already turning away when the open-handed slap caught him across the side of his mouth.

"Ugh?" he protested.

Polly's voice rose shrilly. "Joe! You lying, cheating swine! Who was she?"

"Who was who?" he enquired, though he had a suspicion that it was coming out through his rapidly swelling lip more like "Oogh was Oogh?"

"The tart who's left her lipstick all over your face, that's who! Oh, I should have realised there was something funny going on when you came back from that fight wearing a tuxedo. Oh, Joe! You just don't alter, do you?"

Joe spread his hands. "Look, Polly, really. It isn't what you think -"

She tossed back her hair."Oh, don't bother, Joe. I'm sick of your lying to me. I'm not even interested any more. Just let me go."

Before he could protest that he was not actually impeding her departure she had stormed out of the Lair, slamming the door behind her.

Ruefully, Joe made his way to the bathroom, to inspect the damage in the mirror, and remove the last traces of Miss Kitty O'Farrell's unfortunate outburst of patriotic enthusiasm. There was nothing now to stop his final interview of the evening proceeding, and he didn't want to approach it from a disadvantage.


	10. Joe plays poker with a traitor

Joe sat in the easy chair in the sitting room, which he had carefully moved out of its usual position, so it was on an oblique angle to the door to the Lair. There was a glass of brandy on the little table by his hand - Davies, thoughtfully, had left him the hip flask - and his gun was conveniently next to it, acting, at present, as a paperweight for the envelope Davies had given him earlier.

Intermittently, he ran a hand over his face, probing tenderly at the damage. His lower lip had split: it was certainly going to look a picture in the morning.

Abruptly, he recollected back on the Albion after they'd been retrieved from the escape capsule, his jaw still throbbing from Polly's last powerful punch, his being in the process of assessing the extent of the damage in the mirror, and Dex interrupting him by coming into his quarters to bring him something-or-other, and commenting diffidently that if Polly was going to make a habit of coming along on this sort of thing, would it make sense for Dex to have a word with the Legion's gym instructor and see about getting her some unarmed combat lessons, so she could defend herself more effectively if she got into trouble?

He'd snapped, without bothering to turn round, that so far as he was concerned the last thing she needed was anyone telling her how to punch harder, or with a better grasp of the right direction. And then he'd caught sight of Dex's laughing dark eyes as his face was reflected from behind him in the mirror, and suddenly realised that Dex knew all about why he was touching his jawline tenderly, and that he was being royally teased. And he'd swung round, the laughter bubbling up inside him, because Dex was here and with him and winding him up; not twisted in death under the collapsed wreckage of the base, or the subject of who-knew-what obscene experiments at the hands of Totenkopf's mechanical monsters or ethics-free scientists.

A wave of black misery hit him. He'd taken the last few days on pure adrenaline and black coffee, and now both were losing their powers. If he could only magically go back to that moment, that sunlit cabin, that shared laughter; start over from there. Only this time he'd -

His head went up. The smallest of possible sounds had just become audible from the doorway.

Someone was trying to get in.

Someone with a key.

He let the door get three parts open before he said, in his most icily official Base Commander tones,"Grogan. I thought I'd made it clear that I'd reserved the Lair for myself this evening."

Grogan spun towards the sound, reaching inside his jacket -

And stopped, seeing that Joe's gun was already pointed steadily at his heart.

"Hands in plain sight, Grogan. There's a chair behind you - no, don't turn round. You can kick the door shut with your foot. We don't want to upset the gentlemen in the lobby downstairs, now, do we? The service charges on this place are high enough as it is. That's right. Very good. Now; hands flat on that little table in front of you. Even better. Now, Grogan. I understand you want to talk to me about something?"

Grogan leaned forward and in his rich brogue, which, Joe thought, had never sounded more unattractively stagey than this evening, he started to curse. Every epithet gleaned over a career knocking about in low company everywhere from the Dublin tenements to the brothels of Shanghai and most points in between was brought into play in a hissing stream of focussed invective.

Joe sat through it all; consciously fixing a remote half-smile on his lips and an expression of cool indifference in his grey-green eyes.

Eventually, with one last fling at Dex ("Satan-souled misbegotten twisted-minded faggot bastard") Grogan ran to a stop.

Joe raised an eyebrow. His voice was loaded with boredom. "Try to power it up, did you?"

Fluently, Grogan informed him that he had, indeed, attempted to power up the prototype. 

Joe shrugged."I suppose that's one of the risks you take. If you choose to steal a design. That the operating instructions might not be -as complete as you might have been expecting."

"Well," Grogan snarled maliciously, "I hope you're happy with what they'll be saying by the end of tomorrow about your precious legion and its pet pervert engineer. If the prototype had worked, and you'd been prepared to play ball that would have been one thing. But you outsmarted yourself stealing those prints. Have you never heard anyone say: "Where you cut down one swordsman, ten will spring forward into his place?" A set of those prints will be with every one of your potential contractors before the end of the day tomorrow."

Joe carefully kept his face absolutely straight. Here was, of course, the major question of the evening. Had Grogan, in his hurried, furtive time in the dark room taken the precaution of running off more than one set of prints? Or had he relied upon Miss Kitty O'Farrell's guardianship of the negatives, and assumed that as he could run off prints whenever he liked he only needed to do the bare minimum to prove that what he had in his hand was as devastating as he alleged?

He coughed. "If you'll forgive my mentioning it, you don't seem to have changed for the evening yet. So I'll take the liberty of assuming you've not yet had the pleasure of catching up on the news with the delightful Miss O'Farrell? Who was so anxious to entrust that envelope you gave to her to me, just as soon as I started to sing along with her from the official rebel songsheet. Adorable, isn't she? And sapphires compliment her eyes so perfectly."

Grogan's face changed. He started to rise from his chair; Joe waved him back with a contemptuous gesture with the gun.

"I said; back in the chair, hands on the table, Grogan. And I haven't given you permission to get up yet."

His heart was singing. That half-arrested movement had told him all he wanted to know.

"Where have you put them?" 

Joe raised an eyebrow. "Not here. And that's all I'm telling you, Grogan. Unlike you, I'm not the kind of idiot who puts private jokes to myself in ransom demands."

He put his head on one side. "But there are some things I want to know, Grogan. And since you seem to be in a talkative mood tonight, maybe you'll be minded to tell me?" He did not wait for a response, but continued smoothly onwards. "I've been hearing stories, Grogan. And you're something of a story-teller yourself, aren't you? In fact, you're a bit of an artist in your own line. And like all artists, you always put a bit of yourself into your creations."

He leaned forward, moving the gun around in a tight, controlled circle, always aimed at Grogan's chest. Grogan followed the movement as if hypnotised.

"Except: you know one thing, Grogan? The details in your stories are always spot on; they couldn't have been made up. Someone really saw those happenings, and remembered them, and put them into a story to tell everyone else about. But you know one thing, Grogan? I've always felt - somehow - under my skin, as it were - that something was wrong about your stories. And I think I've finally worked out, after all these years, what that thing is. That is; the position you put yourself. You see; in your stories the one place from which you can't see those little details that you describe so very vividly is the centre of the stage. The details which make them true are the ones you get from an oblique perspective; from the viewpoint of someone who skulks in the shadows. But you're always in the centre of the stage in your stories, aren't you, Grogan?"

He raised the hand that wasn't holding the gun, and snapped his fingers.

"So; I took your stories, Grogan, and I started to wonder what they'd look like once you'd corrected the viewpoint for parallax and compass deviation. And when I switched your stories around, and looked at them from that angle - well, it started to look much more interesting. And then I took my version of your stories, and ran them past British Naval Intelligence, and they found them interesting too. And they started to run them past their friends in the FBI."

Grogan, visibly, had stiffened in his seat. 

"And my stories started to breed other stories. Oh, they started to breed like rabbits, Grogan. F'rinstance, I heard a story about a kid by name of Byrne, from the back streets of Dublin. Hung about on the edge of those sorts of circles, ran errands during the Easter Rising - made a sort of mascot by the lads of the IRB. That sort of thing. Grew up a bit. Carried on fighting with the rebels. Until one of those days there was an ambush on the road to Wexford. An ambush that failed; that the Black and Tans got to hear of first. Nasty, Grogan. I'm sure a man of imagination - such as yourself - can imagine just how nasty."

He clenched his free hand into a fist, and then opened it, letting whatever it might be that he'd crushed within it fall invisibly, inconsequentially to the carpet.

"They said, afterwards - the remnants of the men who'd planned that ambush - that Byrne had been a paid Government informer. But they never found him. But something tells me, Grogan, that they're still looking. That they'll always be looking."

Grogan's face was the colour of sour milk. But he was still, when all was said and done, Legion. He kept his tongue between his teeth, and stared blankly back.

"And then I heard another story, Grogan. About a guy calling himself Malone, working float-planes for a bunch of rum-runners, down between Bimini and the Keys. And one day they get advance weather information. Tropical storm coming in; aiming straight at their hideout. And Malone and a guy called Riley volunteer to be the last men out, securing everything they can while everyone else evacuates in a hurry."

Grogan still never blinked. Joe shrugeed.

"Well, they get back there eventually, to see what's left after the storm. And what do they find but Riley, with a knife in his throat. And Malone's vanished clean away. Along with a little matter of $25,000, which they kept in a safe in the hideout. Kind of insurance in case they had to buy off anyone expensive at short notice, I assume. The guy who told my friends that story happens to be detained in the State Penetentiary at present. The authorities picked him up for something or other. But they tell me he's been a model prisoner. Release date comes up next month, I gather. And after that, no doubt he's looking forward to being reunited with all his old friends and business acquaintances."

Joe leant forwards slightly. Grogan's eyes were fixed on his; Joe doubted if, by now, he could look away if he tried.

"Except he's not going to be reunited with Riley this side of the grave, is he Grogan? And my friends tell me he's very bitter about that. Being as Riley was his kid brother and all that."

"Get to the point," Grogan said hoarsely. "So what? There were once two bad guys with Irish names. So, what've they got to do with me? What have they even got to do with each other? Hell, Sullivan, the amount of paperwork they asked for when I joined the legion - you must have seen my pilot's permits, birth certificate - hell, probably even my vaccination certificate. And they all tell you that I'm Sean Patrick Grogan, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 27th of April 1906."

"They do indeed," Joe said. "And I take your point about Legion paperwork. Sometimes it seems almost as bad as if we were in the regulars." He picked up Davies' envelope, and, one-handed, lifted the flap. "But it turns out that there's one bit of your paperwork we missed, after all. Here. Take it. It's yours."

With a quick sideways flick of his wrist he shied it at Grogan, who, instinctively, put out a hand and caught it. Opened it. And looked up at Joe, who had now risen to his feet.

"Quit bluffing, Grogan. I'm holding a royal flush. " Joe nodded towards the envelope. "It took a bit of digging, but they turned it up in the end. A death certificate. Of one Sean Patrick O'Flaherty Grogan. Who was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1906. And who died there two weeks later."

He was towering over Grogan now, his voice the merest whisper. "Tell me, Grogan, how come you manage to look so healthy given you're a man who's been dead for the best part of 33 years?"

He didn't wait for a response. His fist was already powering forward into the punch. It connected with the point of Grogan's chin and Grogan and the chair went over backwards together. He had finished disarming Grogan and going through his pockets when the Bostonian recovered consciousness. He stared across the room at Joe.

"So," Grogan said, his voice thick with hatred, "what do you plan to do?"

Joe shrugged, his eyes cold. "I've been thinking about that. You see, Grogan, unlike you I find I have difficulty killing a man in cold blood. Especially one I've fought besides. Whatever he's done. I'm giving you eight hours to get clear, Grogan. After that your name, description, photograph, known aliases and history goes to all the authorities who might conceivably take an interest."

Grogan looked up, started to say something, was stopped by an arresting gesture from Joe.

"Oh, and another thing, Grogan. At the same time, a copy of the exact same dossier goes by special delivery to Miss Kitty O'Farrell." Joe's voice continued in its gentle, thoughtful way. "Now, you could say I'm not being a gentleman, telling a lady something like that about a man she - loves. But I don't think Miss O'Farrell's as delicate as she looks. And I don't think she's at all the sort of girl who'd appreciate being kept in the dark about something that's going to matter that much to her, out of some misplaced notion of chivalry. And I know that she is going to find it fascinating - in the end - to learn what you really did for the sake of dear Auld Ireland."

Grogan stumbled to his feet, moving like the animated corpse his papers proved him to be. After he had left the Lair, Joe sat on in silence for a long time. He didn't feel hatred, or triumph or anything so positive as either of those. Just faint nausea, exhaustion, and the profound desire for a bath.


	11. And the men behind the villainy make their first appearance

Three men were sitting in a mahogany-panelled room. Old Masters hung on wires from the picture rail and the ceiling was discreetly shrouded in a green silk ceiling-cloth, whose elegant folds radiated outwards from the central rose, from which depended the electric chandelier whose soft light bathed everything with its serene yellow glow. The only jarring note amid all of the restrained opulence was the mass of bent and twisted metal which two discreet servants had brought in and left on the rich Persian carpet for their contemplation.

The three men regarded it in silence for a long time.

"So," the man with the gold pince-nez said at length, the one whose sheer precision of speech, without anything so vulgarly revealing as an accent, nonetheless suggested that English was not his native tongue, "it would seem our friend was - unduly optimistic - in his promises."

The bull-necked, crop-haired man, whose weather-beaten face implied he spent nine-tenths of his time in the outdoors, and in no mild climate either, twisted his face into an expression of disgust. "He underestimated the faggot's brains, you mean. Tricky as weasels, some of these people." He turned and spat abruptly into the fireplace. "They make me sick."

Pointedly refraining from making any comment on the gesture, the third man, the silver-haired one with the elegant patrician face and the air of habitually holding the destiny of nations between his hands, steepled his fingers and looked sharply over the top of them at the other two.

"When I called us together, gentlemen, it was not for the purposes of conducting a post-mortem. Recriminations are a luxury we are not able to afford. We have suffered a set-back; if we are not careful it could turn into a catastrophe."

"If!" The bull-necked man jutted his chin aggressively. "We spend hundreds of bucks and the best part of two years getting onto the track of this project in the first place. We spend another few grand making sure it gets placed with a contractor where we knew we'd already got a man in place who'd be willing to talk business - at a price - oh, and what a price! And you aren't telling me what he's skinned off us over the last few months for "bribes, sweeteners and unforeseen contingencies" went anywhere other than into his own pocket, either -"

The silver-haired man contemplated him steadily for several minutes.

"In my experience of dealing with men of his type," he said eventually, "they feel - comforted - by the notion that they are defrauding their employer. And they perform infinitely better once they have that particular comfort. And our people were monitoring the situation. His peculations were within acceptable tolerances for such matters."

The man wearing pince-nez leaned forwards. "And, nevertheless, despite our recent - set-back - we have learned, from his last report, of one fact of unquestioned importance. The most likely whereabouts of the missing piece of our jigsaw." He nodded towards the twisted wreck on the carpet.

The bull-necked man snorted. "Yes. In the safe in the office belonging to the Base Commander. Wonderful. And that particular piece of information cost us how much, exactly?"

The man in pince-nez shrugged. "Nevertheless. And I feel that, at this precise moment, gentlemen, that safe is by no means as inaccessible to us as - in ordinary circumstances - we might think it to be."

Both the other two turned abruptly towards him, different expressions of dissent and disbelief springing from their lips. He heard them both out to the end, and then shrugged.

"Quite so, gentlemen. Yet I hold by my original opinion. After all, this - mess -" He gestured again towards the mangled hunk of metal on the carpet"Has at least achieved one objective brilliantly." He leant forwards; the leaping flames in the fireplace reflected in his pince-nez, rendering the expression of the eyes behind them curiously unreadable.  
"Gentlemen, we have succeeded, at least, in causing the most perfect of possible diversions. Think about it."

He made a side-on chopping gesture, like the fall of an executioner's sword, with the edge of his hand. "Liken the aftermath to that of a huge explosion. An explosion, in its own way, worse infinitely than that which our target endured half a year ago. And what happens in the wake of such an explosion? Dust. Debris. Soul searching: how could such an explosion, so devastating, from so unexpected a quarter, ever have been permitted to occur? And, gentlemen, amid all of that activity, who among our opponents will think to look elsewhere; to somewhere wholly untouched by the current devastation, to look for a hair-line crack, a hairline crack which has existed since long before the current excitements; oh, so seemingly innocuous, so almost invisible were one not looking for it, but nevertheless a crack which reaches far further into the heart of our opponent than any explosive - however showy - could possibly do."

His tongue flicked out to lick his thin lips. Unconsciously chilled despite themselves, the other two men recoiled slightly. Seeing it, he smiled.

"Given the right lever, gentlemen, applied to the right place we could prise that crack apart, and turn it into a doorway that would leave us a clear pathway straight to the heart of our enemy." He paused, for a few seconds only. "Gentlemen, I believe that now, if at few times in the future, there are ways we might get a party of our people onto the base; and that if Silverman could be part of that party his - diverse talents - might make him just the lever in just the place I require him to be."

The bull-necked man looked as though he would have liked to spit again, and even the silver-haired man permitted an expression of faint distaste to pass across his chiselled features. The smile on the speaker's face became, somehow, subtly more vulpine.

"Why, what would you, gentlemen? That we should abandon a possible tool because it happens to be a crude and grubby one? Surely you realise that the cruder the tool, the easier it is to discard. At small cost. And so - the less chance of tracing it back to us. Yes?"

The bull-necked man looked across at him. Then he nodded towards the prototype. "And the - tool - who brought you that? What of him?"

From outside the silvery sounds of a clock striking the quarter hours became audible. The silver-haired man took out a watch from a vest-pocket and consulted it.

"Rest assured. The instruction has already been given." He looked up. "Gentlemen. We risk being late for dinner. Should we debate the details below?"

He stood up. The other two drew back to let him pass through to the stairs.

It was then quarter to eight in the evening. At half-past six the next morning a routine police launch patrolling along the East River would pull from the water a bloody battered mass of flesh that had once been a man.

In due (and creditably quick) time they would compare it to missing persons reports, and by certain scars and tattoos conclude that in its life it had once been known as Sean Patrick O'Flaherty Grogan.

So they would inform the relevant authorities. Including the man's late employers, who had filed the missing person report in the first place.

By the time that news would be available Joe would have been in the sky for four hours, fighting the controls of his plane over the storm-tossed Atlantic in an effort to find the one man who, he thought, might be able to decode Franky's thought processes even when she chose to hide them from herself. And so he would not hear the end of Grogan's story until the next day, when he landed in England

[ Link to Part II here ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2402678/chapters/5313011)

**Author's Note:**

> For fanon-related reasons Prohibition is still continuing in America.  Characters based on historical originals express views believed to be those of the originals concerned, as they might have been affected by historical shifts.
> 
> For reasons of length _Fog on the Clyde_ has been presented as a series of four instalments.


End file.
